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Forecasting recessions

John Hussman has a Recession Warning Composite that I am attempting to replicate/improve. The underlying data seems to be easy enough to get from FRED using the quantmod package in R. I don’t quite understand the index Hussman is using for commercial paper, so I used the ‘3-month AA financial commercial paper index’ from FRED.

The PMI index requires scraping a table from the ISM website, which is easy enough to do with the XML package.

Here’s my code so far, please leave a comment and let me know what you think: